Plastic scintillation detectors for precision time-of-flight measurements of relativistic heavy ions

TL;DR

This paper reports on the development and testing of plastic scintillation detectors for precise time-of-flight measurements of relativistic heavy ions, achieving sub-40 ps time resolution for nuclear physics experiments.

Contribution

The study introduces specific plastic scintillation detectors with optimized size and performance metrics for high-precision TOF measurements in nuclear physics.

Findings

Time resolution of 27 ps and 36 ps for the two detectors.

Energy resolution of 3% and position resolution of 2 mm.

Successful application in nuclear reaction cross section measurements.

Abstract

Plastic scintillation detectors for Time-of-Flight (TOF) measurements are almost essential for event-by-event identification of relativistic rare isotopes. In this work, a pair of plastic scintillation detectors of 50 $\times$ 50 $\times$ 3$^{t}$ mm$^3$ and 80 $\times$ 100 $\times$ 3$^{t}$ mm$^3$ have been set up at the external target facility (ETF), Institute of Modern Physics. Their time, energy and position responses are measured with $^{18}$O primary beam at 400 MeV/nucleon. After the off-line walk-effect and position corrections, the time resolution of the two detectors are determined to be 27 ps ($\sigma$) and 36 ps ($\sigma$), respectively. Both detectors have nearly the same energy resolution of 3$\%$ ($\sigma$) and position resolution of 2 mm ($\sigma$). The detectors have been used successfully in nuclear reaction cross section measurements, and will be be employed for upgrading RIBLL2 beam line at IMP as well as for the high energy branch at HIAF.